Most businesses today face a growing number of complex issues that must be resolved. These include human resource, legal, tax, accounting, environmental, financial, consulting, marketing and other issues, many of which must be recognized and responded to in the course of day-to-day operations. Not only are these issues complex, but many issues require specialized expertise in order to adequately address them. The failure to respond to some issues may result in further expense and potential legal problems. For example, In recent years there has been a dramatic rise in employment actions against employers, including harassment, discrimination and wrongful termination actions, by employees. Although it takes only a short time for an employee to make a claim, the employing organization must spend many hours of its own time plus attorney time, to respond to that claim. Many of the claims are eventually dismissed due to lack of merit, but defending against claims without merit still costs employers millions of dollars in legal fees, lost staff time and productivity. Consequently, it would clearly be to the advantage of employers to investigate and address potential employment action issues before they escalate into claims or legal action.
However, many employers are ill equipped to proactively respond to these issues, and other workplace issues, in order to anticipate and prevent legal actions by employees, in order to save money and to comply with various regulations. Though large employers can afford to employ a full time workplace services staff, including human resource and legal staffs, in order to receive and deal with issues before the complaints become employment actions, many times the workplace services staff draw on outside resources for mentoring and “second opinion” purposes. Smaller employers cannot afford to hire a full time staff. Consequently, they have relied on outside consultants, industry groups, or trade associations. Typically, these latter organizations have used two approaches to dealing with employment problems. The first of these approaches uses seminars and meetings to discuss potential problems and to heighten employer awareness of workplace issues. The problem with this approach is that the seminars and meetings generally occur before an actual situation has arisen and thus they cannot deal with the specifics of any given situation. The second approach is to provide expertise and advice to employers after an issue has arisen.
Neither of these approaches is ideal since neither deals with specific situations at the stage where they can be dealt with before significant expenses are incurred. A further approach is to contract with human resource, legal and other consultants to provide support in an “on call” basis so that help is available to deal with situations as they arise. However, this latter approach is relatively expensive.
A second part of the problem is dealing with workplace issues proactively. It would be desirable to anticipate trends and problems and address those issues where problems are likely to arise in the future. For example, insurers who must often pay for legal expenses and claims are also interested in information concerning workplace issues, complaints and their resolution, both for the purposes of avoiding legal action, and for tailoring premiums and offering coverage for areas of new concern. However, privacy concerns generally prevent insurers from pooling information in order to obtain overall views of an area. The alternative is to obtain information from surveys and questionnaires. However, the response rate to such surveys is poor and it is difficult to predict trends from surveys and questionnaires. There is currently no effective method for obtaining information relating to potential claims and their resolution for persons other than customers of a particular company.
Further, many other workplace issues arise which often require the assistance of experts and consultants with expertise in a specific area. These issues include legal tax, accounting, environmental, financial, consulting and marketing issues among others. There are few employers who can maintain a staff of in-house experts on all of these issues just in case the issues should arise. Therefore, it is often necessary to contact experts after an issue has arisen.
Therefore, there is a need for a mechanism to provide workplace assistance to all sizes of employers in a cost effective manner to enable them to deal timely with specific situations. Further, there is a need for a mechanism for gathering data over a large universe of employers concerning workplace issues, complaints and related matters.